In South Florida, life after an earthquake

Haitian children adapt to their new world

One fifth-grader, Madjany Mouscardy, was playing a Hannah Montana computer game when the walls of the second-floor Port-au-Prince office where she sat began "shaking like a swing," she said.

Moments later she had fallen into a hole and was buried in concrete.

"I couldn't breathe. But I said to myself, 'Madjany, you are not going to die,'" recalled the lanky 11-year-old. "And then I started to lift the bricks off me until I could see blue sky."

Sharing a Silver Shores Elementary School classroom with Madjany is Garvey Fils-Amie, who survived the Jan. 12 Haitian earthquake because he was outside his house, doing homework with a tutor, when the world began to crumble.

But his mother Gina, 43, was inside, and though he tried, he could not reach her.

And second-grader Patrice Rameau, 8, begins his story this way: "My house broke."

These three children are among 2,071 earthquake refugees now enrolled statewide. The bulk of the new students are in South Florida schools with 764 in Broward County. Miami-Dade County has 644 evacuees from Haiti, another 279 are enrolled in Palm Beach County.

While most of the children have begun to adjust to the wrenching changes in their lives, each carries hellish memories of the earthquake and its aftermath that are likely to be indelible.

"He will never forget," said Patricia Rameau, 31, of her son Patrice and the terror they shared.

Seconds after the temblor began to tear at the walls of their Port-au-Prince home, mother and son raced barefoot through the streets, joining thousands of other Haitians panicked by reports that a tsunami was coming. They ran for more than an hour, seeking higher ground.

The next night, when hysteria over an impending tidal wave again swept the city, she awakened her only child and they ran again.

"He doesn't want to talk about it. He cries, but he just says that his eye hurts," said Patricia Rameau.

Aurora Francois, Haitian-born principal of Barton Elementary School in Lake Worth, said not all of the six students there – all younger than 6 years old – are adjusting easily. For example, she said, after the parents of one first-grader returned to Haiti, that child has felt abandoned.

"We have to address their emotional needs," said Francois. "But I am confident we will. I will take them home myself if I have to."

Madjany, Patrice and Garvey are three of 11 earthquake survivors enrolled at Silver Shores.

"We feel privileged to get a lot of these kids. We can help them," said Angela Iudica, principal of the Miramar school where about 130 of the 700 students are Haitian-Americans with family or cultural connections to the island nation.

"Kids are really resilient, and if we treat them with some care, and they make friends, they start to feel comfortable. They seem to be fitting in," Iudica said.

Indeed, the trauma and suddenness of the changes the Haitian youngsters face is matched only by the cataclysm itself-- a magnitude 7 earthquake that reduced the capital city to ruins in seconds. Up to 200,000 are believed dead.

Many of the evacuees now enrolled in schools here already had U.S. connections. Many were born here and are American citizens. Others have been here before, on visits to relatives during the summer.

"He associates being here with vacation. He thinks we should eat at Chuck E. Cheese every day," said Patricia Rameau, who runs a kindergarten in Port-au-Prince. She and her son, who is an American citizen, are staying with a cousin in Pembroke Pines.

Some, such as Madjany, had visitor visas.

Still, the children coming out of Haiti in the past weeks have lost their homes. They have been living outdoors, shielded from the sun and rain by bedsheets, trembling at aftershocks. They worried about finding food and water. They became numb to seeing bodies in the street and the smell of death.

"She can't watch the news, because she saw the bodies piling up and bursting [from decomposition]," said Sabine Montas, a native of Haiti who added Madjany to her family – husband Patrick and three children, ages 15, 11 and 8 -- after receiving a pleading call from a long-time friend.

Before Madjany arrived from Haiti on Jan. 21, neither Sabine Montas nor her husband, who runs a Computer Troubleshooters franchise in Pembroke Pines, had ever met the girl.

Garvey, 11, now lives with his uncle, Joseph Julien, a Miramar businessman.

"He was her only son, so they were very close," said Julien of his nephew and sister-in-law. "She would cook for him, spoil him. He was everything to her."

In his two weeks here, Julien said his nephew has said little about his mother.

But he has left clues to his grief. The other day, Julien said he went into the bathroom after the child had showered and found that he had written his mother's name on the steamed-over mirror. Around it he had drawn a heart.